Word of Life Church Podcast

Dave Matthews is someone who hungers and thirsts for justice. It's a theme that repeatedly appears in his songs. What Dave Matthews may not realize, however, is that the justice he hungers for is what the gospel is really all about. In the song Mercy, Dave Matthews sings, "Imagine that we could get it together / Stand up for what we need to be / Cause crying won’t save or feed a hungry child / Can’t lay down and wait for a miracle to change things". And in the song that immediately follows on the album, the recurring line is, "We gotta do much more than believe if we really wanna change things." We DO have to do more than believe and pray. But, we must believe and we must pray. We do this because believing and praying is how we are properly formed into agents of God’s mercy and redemption in the world. Jesus spent his time on earth in ministry changing the world as it was at that very moment. He did not have a focus of teaching people how to go to heaven when they die. Jesus insists that God actually cares about the kind of world we have. Jesus wants us to bring the will of God on earth as it is in heaven, right now! Between now and our death, let's try to bring heaven to earth. Let's multiply mercy.

In the song Demons by The National, Matt Berninger sings about wishing that he could rise above his depression, hurt, and pain, but instead "stays down with his demons". Emotions like shame and anger, lust and loneliness, are human emotions. But, improperly processed and left unattended, these wounds can become the breeding ground for demons, such as addiction, depression, violence, and suicide. Jesus never blamed people for their sins or for their demons. Jesus came, not to condemn people for their demons, but to lift them out! Alone, a person may not have the ability to rise above their demons. But a person can always turn towards Jesus. You don't have to stay down with your demons. Jesus can heal you and set you free from those demons.

If Blowin' In The Wind is a modern psalm of prophetic imagination, The Whole Night Sky is a modern psalm of lament. The idea that faith is a means of avoiding suffering is a big con. It is popular, but it's simply not true. Faith does not give us an exception from being human. Faith does not prevent pain and suffering. What faith does is enable us to encounter God, even in our pain, and give us purpose. Our purpose it to become fully human, like Jesus. Jesus endured pain and suffering, but transformed it into grace and beauty. Jesus' faith transformed an ugly crucifixion into the beautiful cruciform. We will either transform our pain or we will transmit our pain and hurt other people. Faith enables us to transform our pain from something ugly and destructive into something beautiful and redemptive. Jesus saves us in our pain and suffering, not by taking us out of it, but by sharing it with us. We are not alone in our pain and suffering; God in Christ shares it with us.

Micah the poet/prophet was living during a time of economic prosperity, but he warned Israel and Judah of pending punishment. While judgment was coming, Micah expressed his desire to wait for the salvation of God. Much of the Christian journey is waiting. Following Jesus requires more patience than power. While many of us hate waiting, we find that in waiting we become more like Jesus. Waiting is the work of prayer where we create space for God to be at work. Prayer, corporate worship, and small groups are all places where we can wait on God.

Pearl Jam front-man Eddie Vedder has quietly written and recorded a number of acoustic-driven songs over the last six years, songs filled with meaning and substance. In 2007, he wrote "Society" for the soundtrack to Into the Wild, a movie about Chris McCandles, a young man who lived life off the grid. Vedder captures the spirit of McCandles who said good-bye to a world filled with greed and consumerism. Jesus gives us a similar call to exit a world of wealth, a culture of consumerism, and a society of stuff. Life, according to Jesus, does not consist in the abundance of possessions.

The Grammy-award winning, Philly-based, hip-hop band The Roots collaborated with Monsters of Folk to create a prayer in the form of a song. The heart of the song is the ancient question, "Why do we suffer?" Through artistry and poetry, the song wrestles with the classic problem of evil, that is, if God is all-good, all-loving, and all-powerful then why is evil and suffering still present in the world? In confronting this problem, we are well served by acknowledging evil instead of ignoring it, praying instead of simply reacting, and looking for solutions instead of assigning blame. In the end, while we do not find explanations, we do find hope in the mystery of our faith: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

What are prophets? Prophets are channels, conductors, conduits of holy imagination. Prophets have enough of the spirit of God to imagine the world other than it is. They give artistic expression to an alternative way of arranging the world. Today we tend to call them poets—but prophets are really just spirit-filled poets. In Blowin’ In The Wind we have a modern day poet asking a prophetic question: “How many roads must a man walk down? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.” But what does that even mean? Is the answer just too ethereal to grasp? Or does it mean the answer is right in front of us? Perhaps the answer is from the breath of God, from the deep spirit of God, from the blowin’ wind of God.

When we feel hurt, threatened, angered by a person, an incident, or some situation, we instinctively view it through a perspective of self-defense. If you are a non-contemplative person you will think your perspective is the total truth. We must have a change in perspective, or we will forever look at the world the same way. There are breakthroughs in perspective that occur through the practice of contemplative prayer that can happen no other way. Contemplative prayer is prayer without agenda and largely without words. In contemplative prayer, you sit with your problems and issues in the presence of Jesus. Jesus can give us an entirely new perspective outside of ourselves.

In his gospel John strategically places seven miracles of Jesus as signs to guide us. These signs are intended to point us to the right way to believe in Jesus the Christ. In the final installment of the Seven Signs In The Gospel of John series, we have a surprise. There is actually an eighth, hidden sign in John's book. It is the sign of new beginnings. New beginning is one of John's major themes in his gospel. And when we read the account of Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb early on the third day after Christ's crucifixion, only to find the tomb empty, we are seeing the new beginning of the world. Jesus Christ is the firstborn of the new humanity. In Jesus Christ humanity finds its second genesis. In Jesus Christ we recover our original vocation: to make the world a garden.

Jesus' received word that his friend Lazarus was sick and Jesus responded by waiting two whole days before he went to see him. During this time Lazarus died. His sisters, Martha and Mary, were grief-stricken. When Jesus went to see them, he did not lecture them or preach at them, but he entered into their grief, encouraging them and weeping with them, shedding the very tears of God. When he went to the tomb of Lazarus he raised him from the dead signaling the defeat of death, so that all who put their faith in Jesus no longer fear death, as the sting of death had been removed.